Well the title is rather misleading; I don't think even they think they will produce any AI out of this.
I think the reasoning goes more like:
1. Intelligence is good at representing information succinctly.
2. This is similar to what a data compression algorithm does.
3. Maybe if we come up with some uber-powerful compression algorithms, it will teach us something about intelligence too.
There's actually been a lot of papers about the parallels between data compression and AI. Look up the program "MegaHal" and papers on it by Jason Hutchens. He shows how a Markov model can be thought of as a kind of data compression.
That being said, there are theoretical limits on data compression efficiency, as shown by work by Shannon and Huffman. These apply to lossless compression, so at best I think all they would be doing is experimentally verifying the theoretical limits. If they want to find a data compression algorithm that tells them something about intelligence, it's going to have to be a lossy compression algorithm, not lossless.
I think the reasoning goes more like: 1. Intelligence is good at representing information succinctly. 2. This is similar to what a data compression algorithm does. 3. Maybe if we come up with some uber-powerful compression algorithms, it will teach us something about intelligence too.
There's actually been a lot of papers about the parallels between data compression and AI. Look up the program "MegaHal" and papers on it by Jason Hutchens. He shows how a Markov model can be thought of as a kind of data compression.
That being said, there are theoretical limits on data compression efficiency, as shown by work by Shannon and Huffman. These apply to lossless compression, so at best I think all they would be doing is experimentally verifying the theoretical limits. If they want to find a data compression algorithm that tells them something about intelligence, it's going to have to be a lossy compression algorithm, not lossless.